Charlotte Mullins comments on Still Life

UPON a roughly hewn wooden table resides a sage-green platter. A halved melon balances on top, seeds peppering the ripe flesh. Alongside, a folded backgammon board echoes the fruit’s green tones. Several counters appear as flat white and black discs across the painting’s surface and the melon’s black centre looks like the soundhole of a Picasso guitar.

The nod to Picasso is deliberate. This still life by Robert Macbryde is teeming with Cubist tricks of the eye. The table’s convincing wood grain, the trompe l’oeil ‘fold’ of the board—macbryde was so inspired by Picasso and Braque’s Cubism that, at one point, he was nicknamed Macbraque.

Macbryde was born in Ayrshire in Scotland as Cubism reached its apogee in Paris. The son of a labourer, he left school at 15 and worked in a factory before winning a scholarship to study at the Glasgow School of Art. On his first day, he met Robert Colquhoun, a fellow painter who became his lifelong partner. Together, they studied in Glasgow and toured Europe before settling in London.

The artists were part of the Bohemian Soho set with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in the 1940s, were photographed by Vogue and courted by Tate. But heavy drinking, decreasing sales and caring for Colquhoun led to a decline in the number of works Macbryde was able to complete in his later years. He died broken-hearted and penniless in Ireland aged 52, four years after Colquhoun drank and painted himself to death.